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A daughter’s eyes, a
mother’s ears
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Grace Cooey had a profound bond with
her daughter
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| By Tom G. Kernaghan |
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| Many are called but few get up. |
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Elsie M. MacIntosh
July 4th, 1925 |
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In the same month Grace’s cousin
wrote the above words, John Scopes was found guilty of
teaching the theory of evolution in Dayton, Tennessee.
Grace supported true progress, especially in education,
and admired Scopes for his fortitude.
Grace got up, time after time throughout her life. She
got up at Central Tech, where she was a medal-winning
swimmer, and played basketball, volleyball, baseball,
and badminton. She got up at U of T and proved that hockey
was also for women. And years later she got up when nature
kept her from bearing children.
H.W. Cooey raised his daughter to rise to challenges.
In his own lifetime, Herbert was an achiever. He supervised
a large staff of munitions workers at his Annex firearms
plant during the First World War. He won a gold medal
for trap shooting at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition
in England. At age 12, he rode his bike to Owen Sound
after a dispute with his stepmother. And with an elementary
school education, and a preternatural grasp of engineering
design and business, he patented combustion engines and
built a small empire that made him a millionaire. Herbert
and his wife Susannah were part of the new and affluent
industrial merchant class growing on the city’s
edge. Many of Herbert’s workers, who were loyal
and full of admiration, rented rooms in his relatives’
homes along Howland Avenue.
So when as a young child Grace lost much of her hearing
to a severe nasal infection, it was no surprise that she
was determined to carry herself through a life of missed
utterances and general ignorance toward the hearing impaired.
In my last column, I mentioned that Grace was often her
daughter Alison’s eyes. Part of what made their
bond so strong was that Alison was her mother’s
ears, when hearing aids failed against the march of old
age.
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Grace (back row, second from left), poses with
Central Technical School's woman's baskeball team.
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Their bond was profound and enduring.
Grace often visited Alison before she left the Annex in
1962. They would spend hours walking the streets, while
Grace recalled her own teen years, her relatives on Howland
Avenue and Walmer Road, and the early days of her father’s
factory. By late 1962, however, Herbert was gone and the
Cooey firearms operation was now part of Winchester Canada,
the building itself home to the Cobourg Star (still there
today). And the Howland and Bridgman avenues plant was
long closed. To my knowledge, she didn’t set foot
in the Annex again until the late 1980s, when Alison brought
her back to Central Tech, where for the first time she
saw the school’s lower level that girls were forbidden
to access in the 1920s.
Though a progressive thinker, Grace was a woman who understood
the importance of old stories, and she relayed her detailed
accounts with startling clarity and heartening emotion.
When she spoke her eyes conveyed mute sadness for the
people no longer in her life. But they also expressed
a deep love for this community and its mystique, which
still lingers among the giant oak trees and majestic red
brick houses today. Her Annex was in a period of hope
and change—it still is and therefore, in some ways,
it remains the same.
A lifelong member of The Business and Professional Women’s
Association, Grace travelled the world; taking in the
stories and cultures she could only dream about when she
was a child on Bathurst Street. Regrettably, poor health
and circumstances kept her from visiting me when I moved
to the Annex in 1992. But a long pull on her cigarette
and a knowing smile were evidence to me that she knew
why I had moved down here. Just before she died in 1998,
I looked into her eyes and imagined all they had seen
in this neighbourhood and in the world around it.
Grace used to say: “Anyone who stops learning when
they graduate has for all their formal education learned
nothing. Never forget, learning is for life.”
For years I have taken this philosophy to heart. Learning
and sharing were at the core of her nature and the way
she lived. And I intend to further honour her words with
my own in the coming columns.
Tom G. Kernaghan writes Through Grace’s Eyes, a monthly
column on Grace Eleanor Cooey, who was born and raised
in the Annex at the beginning of the 20th century.
(Through Grace's Eyes -- The Annex Gleaner -- May 2004 issue)
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